Blunt Darts

by Jeremiah Healy

  He said, “Your Honor, I believe the Bonham police prosecutor is on the telephone arranging to bring in a witness.”

  Kinnington glared down at him, then raised and banged his gavel once, sharply. “Case dismissed for lack of prosecution.”

  I was stunned, but the young cop/prosecutor gamely tried a stall. “If your Honor please, I can run back and—”

  “Case dismissed!” boomed the judge, whose microphone was set, I suspect, a bit higher than anyone else’s. The defendant and her lawyer wisely got the hell out of dodge as fast as their feet could carry them.

  And so it went. Of the twenty or so preliminary rulings I saw Kinnington make, at least six were similarly outrageous, yet he seemed to favor neither police nor defendants as a class. Each decision seemed arbitrary, depending only upon which party was giving the most affront to the judge’s sense of how his time was best spent. I’m sure all six rulings were technically defensible. My point is that it was clear to everybody in the courtroom that the six were unfair and showed an incredible disregard for common sense.

  Ah, I almost forgot. About four names (or three minutes) after the “case-dismissed” defendant, the central doors squeaked again and a fiftyish, crew-cut guy in a brown double-knit blazer and baggy blue slacks hustled down the center aisle. I didn’t know his name, but I recognized him from the Bonham firing range. He entered the bar enclosure and sat down hurriedly next to the Meade police prosecutor who’d stood up for him earlier. As the young one whispered to the old one, the Bonham guy turned to him with a look of disbelief on his face and half-rose from his chair. Then he sunk back down, faced front, and bowed his head, pounding the counsel table three times silently with his fist.

  After the criminal cases had been called, Kinnington muttered something to his clerk, who turned to the judge and then turned back around with a surprised look on his face. “Court will recess for thirty minutes.”

  “All rise,” shouted the elderly court officer as Kinnington scampered off the bench as quickly as he had ascended it and exited through the same door.

  “Shit, man, we’re gonna be here all fuckin’ day!” said the kid next to me as his friend and he got up and impatiently edged past me into the center aisle.

  About half the courtroom’s population decided to do the same. I could feel the exodus clearing when a five-pound ham dropped on my shoulder. A gruff, egg-breathed voice said, “His Honor wants to see you in his chambers. Now.”

  I put on my most indifferent face and swiveled my head around. Giant’s eyes were small and mean.

  “I don’t expect any special treatment, you know,” I said mildly.

  “Now, asshole.”

  I got up, and we walked abreast to a side door just forward of the right-hand seating area. I decided Giant was pushing six-feet-seven and maybe three-hundred pounds. He used a key on the lock, and I moved before he could shove me through said door. We entered a narrow corridor with PRIVATE stenciled on the painted walls. After a sharp left, Giant bumped both of us into a small, outer office with a striking brunette secretary behind the reception desk. She glanced up, then down again, as if she didn’t want to be able to say later on that she recognized my body.

  Giant rapped a knuckle twice on the heavy-looking inner door and then pushed it open. I walked in ahead of him and glimpsed reddish hair behind the cloud of cigar smoke hanging over a massive desk. Then I was whirled around and against the wall. The door slammed as Giant said, “Assume the position.”

  I did so, with my hands outstretched on the wall, and Giant spread my legs a little wider. He locked one foot inside my right one and gave me a rough upper-body patdown.

  When I was in army officer training, an Intelligence-branch major taught us to check a man’s crotch for any weapons. When I was actually in the field, a Military-Police sergeant showed me how to bring the frisking hand up just right to ring the friskee’s chimes without any abrupt motion being apparent to an onlooker. I looked down as Giant started his hand up the inside of my right calf, saw the telltale turning of his wrist, and shifted my weight to the left just in time to catch most of his goose on my inner right thigh. Nevertheless, I experienced a gentle tinkling of bells.

  Giant snickered and moved back from me as I straightened up.

  “He’s clean, your Honor. And savvy from somewhere.”

  Kinnington gestured with the cigar. “Please be seated, Mr. Cuddy.”

  No surprise there. Giant had probably read my plates when I pulled out of the judge’s driveway yesterday. One call to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, another to the Boston police, and a third by them to the Copley Square rent-a-car would have yielded my name and a whole lot more. Still, I had the feeling that Eleanor Kinnington would be disappointed in me. I also didn’t like being roughhoused, even a little, by Giant. But I liked the judge’s style sufficiently less that I maintained my composure and dignity.

  Which is a roundabout way of saying that I sat.

  “Why were you visiting my mother yesterday?”

  “Does Baby Huey have to hear all this?” I asked. Giant sucked in his breath behind me, as though he’d been waiting thirty years for somebody to dare calling him that.

  “Officer Blakey will stay.” Well, one question answered, partially by Mrs. Page back at the estate. I must have missed the nameplate on the blue pup tent with sleeves that Giant wore.

  Kinnington continued, “By the way, I am sorry about the search, but no security system, even ours, is foolproof. I’m sure you understand.” He smiled and now gestured to a box on his desk. “Would you care for a cigar?”

  “No.”

  The smile evaporated and was replaced by the case-dismissed look. “Then, again, why were you visiting my mother?”

  “If you must know, we had a date for racquetball.”

  The judge’s eyes glanced up and then down. The ham applied itself to my shoulder again and, this time, started to squeeze. The initial pain was welcomely replaced by a spreading numbness.

  “By the way,” I said through reasonably unclenched teeth, “did you hear the one about the Long Island judge who couldn’t stand lousy coffee?”

  I was referring to an incident in New York some years earlier. A judge had had his bailiffs handcuff a guy selling coffee outside the courthouse and drag him in to explain why the stand’s output was so rotten. I couldn’t remember what had happened to that judge, but apparently Kinnington did, because he waved Blakey off. My blood sang on its happy way back to my shoulder.

  “Mr. Cuddy, I do not wish to see you around my property or my family again. Ever. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I’ve understood every word you’ve said, Judge.” I stood and, not having been knocked down, turned and walked to the door. Blakey backed up, keeping two paces away from me, and swung it open for me.

  “See ya’ around the quad, Cuddly Bear,” I said softly to Blakey as I exited past him.

  “Remember,” said Blakey, just as softly.

  In the court lobby I stopped at an enclosed pay phone. I called information, got the number I wanted, and dialed it.

  “Sturney and Perkins, good morning.”

  “Good morning. This is John Francis calling from Judge Kinnington’s court.” I never like to tell a lie. “The judge and I were just speaking about a confidential matter that one of your people is handling, but frankly, the investigator’s name has slipped my mind.”

  “Just a moment, please.” There was a click, then dead space, then another click.

  “That would be Ms. DeMarco, but I’m afraid she won’t be in until two. Can I give her a message?”

  “Gee,” I said in my best Andy Hardy voice, “that’s inconvenient for telephoning. But hold on, the judge is in his lobby next-door.” I drummed my fingers through one verse of the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” so the no-doubt harried switchboard operator, when I got her back on, would not want to talk very long. “Okay, I can be at your offices by two-thirty. Just leave a message that I’ll see Ms. DeMarco then.
”

  “Fine. Thank you,” the words as crisp as the hang-up that followed them.

  I left the courthouse, walked casually to its parking lot, and retrieved my .38 from the Mercury’s trunk. My watch read only 10:10. The cat being out of the bag, I decided to rattle some more local cages before driving back to Boston. I crisscrossed Meade center until I spotted the town’s police station. I pulled into a “PUBLIC” space (miracle-in-the-making: no meters) and went inside.

  Six

  THE DESK SERGEANT blinked twice at me. “What did you say, buddy?”

  I decided against raising my voice. “I asked if could I please see whoever’s in charge of investigating the disappearance of Judge Kinnington’s son.”

  “Sit down over there.”

  I took up half a bench across the small anteroom. The sergeant lifted a receiver and punched in just two numbers, making it an internal call. I gave him one of my best Gaelic smiles.

  He cupped a palm over the mouthpiece of his phone. I hoped he wasn’t going to yell anything confidential to me, since you have to cover both ends of the receiver to be sure the other party on the line can’t hear what—

  “Your name?”

  “John Francis Cuddy, Sergeant.”

  He repeated the words into the phone, then said, “Right” and hung up. “The Chief will be back to me in a few minutes.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” I said, and waited patiently. Non-commissioned officers in every hierarchy I’d ever known love it when you address them by their title.

  Five minutes later, the sergeant’s phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Yes, Chief.” A short, pudgy uniform opened the door behind the desk, and the sergeant hung up.

  “Hey, Dexter, show Mr. Cuddy here to the Chief’s office.”

  The newcomer stopped, nearly clicking his heels together, and motioned. “Follow me, sir.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” I repeated as we moved into the corridor.

  “This is it, sir,” said my guide in front of a newly painted door.

  “Thank you, Dexter.”

  “Yes, sir,” he beamed, pushing out his chest. I was certain that he was somebody’s eager nephew.

  I knocked and heard a near-human growl from within, so I entered the office.

  There was a small brass placard on the desk that said SMOLLETT. No rank or title, just the surname. The metal was old and worn-looking. I got the impression the chief had bought it when he first came on the force, because he was old and worn-looking too, with a voice that sounded like a ’47 Nash without any mufflers.

  “What do you want?” Smollett said.

  I decided to sit down anyway. “I want to speak with whoever’s looking into Stephen Kinnington’s disappearance.”

  “That’s a missing-person case,” folding hands gnarled by arthritis in front of him. “It’s been looked into.”

  “Then can I see the reports and talk to the investigating officer?”

  “Why?” Smollett asked, quite reasonably.

  “Because I’ve been retained to find him,” I replied.

  “I want to know who retained you.”

  “Why?” I asked, also quite reasonably.

  “Get out,” he said, his eyes bulging a bit.

  “Look, Chief,” I said with some heat, “I’ve talked with the boy’s grandmother, father, and now the chief of police of the town he skipped from. And so far all I’m getting told is to butt out. Now, if this were a criminal case, I could see it. The too-many-cooks problem. But with a missing person, the more knowledgeable people actively searching, the more likely somebody will find something.”

  “Get out,” he said again, his folded hands trembling a little.

  I complied.

  Seven

  AFTER I LEFT THE POLICE station, I drove around Meade for an hour, just taking streets to see where they went and to get an idea of how many ways there might be for a fourteen-year-old boy to leave town. Even Meade’s finest must have checked with bus drivers and the few cabs that plied the town. My guess was a cross-country hike until he was out of Meade and then maybe hitchhiking northwest to Worcester, northeast to Boston, or even southeast to Providence, Rhode Island. From any city, his transportation opportunities were limitless.

  Even with publicity, the chances that someone would come forward to say, “Yeah, I picked up the kid,” were astronomically small. Without publicity, there was no chance at all to trace his route. I was going to have to be very lucky and hope that I could figure out what city he’d chosen as his jumping-off point.

  I cut short my wanderings and drove to the outskirts of Brookline, a beautiful bedroom suburb of Boston, but really a small city in its own right. I stopped at the telephone booth in a gas station.

  The yellow pages showed two “Dr. D. Steins” in Brookline but one was eliminated by his D.D.S. degree. Dr. Stein the psychiatrist was in a large, old-stone medical building on Beacon Street across from the 1200 Beacon Motel. I eased the rent-a-car into one of the slanted, center-divider parking spaces, crossed the street, and entered the foyer.

  I found Stein’s door on the fourth floor and opened it. The foyer below and the hallway above were nondescript, but the psychiatrist’s waiting room was elaborately furnished with a comfortable-looking sofa and four easy chairs arranged around a midsized, muted rug. The walls were a soft beige, with non-strident landscapes and seascapes. If Dr. Stein intended his patients’ surroundings to be soothing, his intention was successfully realized.

  As I closed the door, I heard a low-toned bong. There was no receptionist, and indeed no desk nor interior window for one. I was halfway to the inner-office door when it opened.

  “Yes?” said a tallish, slim man about forty. His initial smile of greeting faded as he failed to place me. He had a beard that was redder than the moplike, sand-colored hair on his head.

  “Dr. Stein?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m John Cuddy. I believe Mrs. Kinnington called you?”

  “Kinnington? She may have. I’ve been in group most of the morning. Kinnington?”

  “I have a letter from her.” I lifted it from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. He looked down at it.

  “Yes, well …” Stein seemed only to skim the letter, but he nevertheless kept it in his hand when he looked back up. “I’ll have to check my service. I never take calls when I’m in group. In another fifteen minutes or so I can see you. Please sit down.”

  Stein withdrew into the inner office and closed the door. I sat down and scanned his eclectic magazine collection. I flipped through two old New Yorker magazines (which I read only for the cartoons) and was halfway through my third Field and Stream article (in their largemouth-bass annual issue) when the inner door reopened and a string of two men and three women of varying ages filed out. From the distrustful looks they passingly gave me, I think the waiting room’s soothing qualities were pretty much wasted on them.

  Stein was last out. He smiled at me and beckoned. I followed him in. Seating himself in a highback chair behind his desk, he bade me sit as well, so I dragged a visitor’s lowback up to the front of the desk.

  “I am sorry about disturbing you before,” I said.

  Stein waved me off as he sank, somewhat relieved, into his desk chair. “Not at all, not at all. In fact, despite what they say in clinic, I think an occasional interruption may be good for a group.” He shot me a mischievous smile. “It’s certainly good for me.”

  I smiled back. He reached for the telephone and hit one button. “Checking my service,” he said to me as an aside.

  Stein spoke with the service for a while, taking down several quick notes on a pad. He said, “She did?” several times, then said thank you and hung up.

  “Well,” he said to me, “it seems your Mrs. Kinnington was quite insistent on reaching me. Virtually threatened my service with legal action if she were not put through.”

  “She’s a very determined woman. And quite concerned about Stephen.”


  “Stephen, Stephen, yes, yes,” Stein said as he looked at Mrs. Kinnington’s letter again, and then rose and crossed to one of six file cabinets in the room. He pulled back a drawer, retrieved a file, and, opening it, came back to his seat.

  Turning the pages of the file, Stein spoke to me. “Mrs. Kinnington says in her note only that Stephen is missing. According to the file here and my recollection as well, Stephen’s father was the family member most involved with Stephen’s … ah, stay at Willow Wood.”

  I chose my words carefully. “Mrs. Kinnington was out of the country at the time. Both she and the judge are doing everything possible to locate him. You are just one link, but perhaps an important one, in that chain.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Whatever momentary reticence he had had now seemed to dissolve. “Well then, how can I help you?”

  I breathed an inner sigh of relief and plunged on. “We don’t know why Stephen has disappeared. We thought you might be able to give us some idea.”

  Stein pursed his lips and flipped back to the front of the file. “According to my records, I last saw Stephen over three years ago. Aside from my file entries, I really have little recollection of him.”

  Fishing the photo that Eleanor Kinnington had given me, I leaned forward a bit and held it up for the good doctor. “What I am really interested in is why Stephen, after apparently doing so well for so long, suddenly does an about-face. Now, it may have been a new occurrence, or it may have been a recurrence of something from his past. If we know what caused him to act, we might have a starting point for tracing him.”

  Stein waved off the photo, then tented his fingers and gave me a superior smile. “That’s assuming that he departed of his own accord. Has that been established?”

  “Not conclusively, but all the available evidence points toward his having run away rather than to kidnapping.”

  Stein nodded. He looked to his left and again reread Mrs. Kinnington’s letter. He seemed to be trying to memorize it. “I presume that time is of the essence, as the lawyers say?”

  “Yes. The longer it takes us to find the key, the lower our chances of finding the boy.”